Website Design

The design of the EvoClub website came out as expected during the planning phase. The website has been designed using WordPress platform. Use of WordPress made the whole process of designing relatively easy and less time consuming because most the features needed have already been implemented in the platform.

The design of the website has many images to make it more appealing to all target audience. The main goal adopted while designing the website was simplicity in order to achieve all features that were planned for during the planning phase. Keeping the design simple involved selecting a simple theme from the hundreds of themes provided by WordPress. This theme helped to define the layout of the website in a more applicable way.

The main purpose of the website is to provide a platform through which information can be relayed to the members and club events can be documented in the website for future reference. The design of the website has been able to achieve all this expectations by translating the requirements to a good design. EvoClub members can get information about upcoming events. The members can also view images of past events that have been held by the club by accessing the Gallery page. Each page of the website has the upcoming events widget and a Facebook plugin that fetches feeds from the club’s Facebook page.

Considering that the target audience is mainly between the ages of 25 to 35 years, the design of the website is appropriate for the target audience as it has been developed with simplicity in-mind in order to achieve almost all features that were discussed in the planning phase. The website is made of more than one page to make sure the information is structured and classified thus making it easy for the target audience to use the website to get their desired information.

While creating the design of the website, a few things were considered in order to achieve a good design that serves its purpose to the target audience. These considerations are;

• The type of content- The website has different types of contents which is update on a regular basis thus there was need to design more than one page based on the classifications of the content. For example, since the club has different events, an events page which has details about upcoming events was designed. The club also keeps a gallery of pictures from previous events thus a gallery page was designed for use as the gallery for the pictures taken during past events.
• Balance of text and other materials- For the website to have a good design and to communicate with the target audience a balance must be struck between the text used and other materials like images. The website did not use a lot of text in all the pages, instead, different images were used interchangeably with text to make sure there was a balance thus the website was able to communicate to the target audience in an appealing way for every page.
• The writing style used for every page ensured that the content is structured in a good format by use of titles and paragraphs to format text in an orderly fashion thus making it easy for the target audience to read the information.

The design of the website was influenced by many different websites but the most notable website from where most of the design concepts were derived from is https://www.wrxsa.com. This website is somehow similar to EvoClub except that the target audience of the website are people who are passionate about Subaru WRX. The website has struck a good balance between text and images. By using more images and less text, the website can effectively communicate to its target audience. This is mostly inspired my design of the EvoClub website.

Target Audience

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) involves making it easy for search engines to index the website such that when a prospect visitor searches the website on a search Engine like Google or Bing, the search engine is able to index the website and return results based on the search phrase of the visitor. A website that can be searched in a search engine easily is referred to as search engine friendly.

By default, websites designed and deployed using WordPress are search engine friendly because WordPress structures the code in a form that is easy to index by search engines. This reduced the amount of time that would have been spent designing all the webpages in a way that is search engine friendly. After deploying the website using WordPress, the only step that is required is to make the website public and to check the allow pages to be indexed by search engines option. After making the website and checking that option, the website search engine friendly. There are other measures that can be done to make the website more search Engine friendly. For example while using Google, the sitemap of the website can be uploaded in Google to facilitate easier indexing of the website.

When the website is searched on a search engine for example Google, the website appears in search results. However, the website is not very highly ranked. This can be improved using social media where by pages related to the website can be created. Another option is using premium SEO services by purchasing SEO packages that help the website to get a better rank when it is searched on a search engine. SEO considerations affected my design decisions because I had to make sure that every page was search engine friendly by use of tags like headings.

From the planning stage, to the implementation stage up to the deployment phase a lot of activities were carried out. Planning involved coming up with a topic and defining different expectations of the website depending on the target audience. The final design for EvoClub website has achieved most of its requirements as defined in the planning phase of the project. However, not all requirements that defined have been achieved. There requirements include;

• The website does not have complete content in all the pages as there are some pages that require a little bit more content for them to communicate with the target audience. However, these pages will be updated as times goes by after the website is launched.
• Search Engine Optimization has not been done extensively, for example creation of a sitemap and then uploading the sitemap to search engines like Google Maps has not been done. This requirement was not covered within the design because WordPress provides a basic level of Search Engine Optimization and this can be taken advantage of by designing every page in a search engine friendly way.

However, the website has more successes than limitation in terms of the initial requirements that were defined in the planning stage. Based on the topic selected the following achievements have been met on the design.

• The website has more than one page thus information is structured and classified in the correct format thus making it easy for the target audience to interact with the website.
• The design of the website has struck a balance between the text and other materials thus making the website appealing and able to communicate to the target audience.
• Visitors are able to view upcoming events.
• Users are able to view the gallery with pictures of past events.
• Users are able to contact the club using a contact form.

The website is ready to be launched at this point. This will be done by making the website public on the WordPress platform. Once the website goes live visitors will be able to view it through this link; https://evoclubco.wordpress.com/